"The free colored people were looked upon as an inferior caste to whom their liberty was a curse, and their lot worse than that of the slaves, with this difference, that while the latter were to be kept in bondage 'for their own good' it would have been very wicked to enslave the former for their good."[[232]]
OUTLAY NECESSARY TO EMANCIPATION
We need not pause to consider the causes which reduced the free negroes of the Northern States to the conditions here described. That the free negroes of Virginia should have made little or no progress is easily accounted for by the abnormal conditions amid which they lived. There was confessedly scant chance for free negroes in communities densely populated with negro slaves. Many of the friends of emancipation, however, observing this same phenomenon in both slave and free states, came to the conclusion that freedom under existing conditions was hurtful rather than helpful. Others concluded that it was not freedom, but the lack of freedom with all its normal privileges, which had fettered the feet of these newly manumitted slaves. Let the state pay the owners and emancipate the whole body of slaves; let education and training for freedom go hand in hand with opportunity for achieving, and then emancipation would be justified of her children. For this immense outlay Virginia was confessedly not ready, and so the earnest believer in emancipation looked to colonization as the only door through which the slave might enter upon liberty with a man's chance for progress and self-respecting independence.
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[228]
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Writings of Jefferson, Ford, Vol. X, p. 66.
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[229]
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History of the United States, McMaster, Vol. III,
p. 558.
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[230]
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The African Repository and Colonial Journal, Vol.
VI, No. 1, p. 12.
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[231]
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Liberia Bulletin, No. 15, p. 7.
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[232]
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William Lloyd Garrison, by his children, Vol. I,
pp. 253-254.
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